Short answers, pulled from the story.
Football and soccer are two names for the same sport, association football. The name soccer comes from Oxford slang built on the suffix -er, used at the University of Oxford in England from about 1875, beginning as assoccer before shrinking to its modern form. People in Great Britain and most of Ulster call it football, while Australia, Canada, South Africa, most of Ireland, and the United States usually call it soccer.
The Football Association was founded in London in 1863 and published the first set of rules that same year. It first met on the morning of the 26th of October 1863 at the Freemasons' Tavern on Great Queen Street in London, and 11 clubs under FA secretary Ebenezer Cobb Morley ratified the original 13 laws.
Cuju, meaning kickball, is the earliest kicking game for which historical evidence survives, played in China and standardised during the Han dynasty between 206 BCE and 220 CE. Players passed the ball without letting it touch the ground, then kicked it through the fengliu yan, a circular goal atop poles 10 to 11 meters high. It influenced kemari in Japan and chuk-guk in Korea.
Association football is played between two teams of 11 players each, who almost exclusively use their feet. A standard adult match runs for two halves of 45 minutes each, for a total of 90 minutes, with the clock running continuously even when the ball is out of play.
In 1921 the English Football Association outlawed the women's game on its members' pitches, declaring football quite unsuitable for females, a move critics linked to envy of large crowds like the 53,000 who attended one match in 1920. Restrictions eased in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the FA rescinded its ban in 1971. The FIFA Women's World Cup was inaugurated in 1991 in China with 12 teams.
FIFA is the recognised international governing body for football, headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, with 211 affiliated national associations and six regional confederations. The Laws of the Game are set by the International Football Association Board, formed in 1886, which consists of four FIFA representatives and one each from the four British associations.
The men's FIFA World Cup is the world's most widely viewed sporting event, inaugurated in 1930 and held every four years. The 2022 tournament in Qatar was estimated to be watched by 5 billion people, more than 60 percent of the global population, and was won by Argentina, their third title.